That small step on the
road to becoming a global holiday giant saw Cook – a Baptist minister in Market
Harborough, Leics, who ­developed an eye for a business opportunity – host 500
paying people on a 12-mile trip by train from Leicester to Loughborough for a
Temperance meeting.

That’s about as far as you
can get from jetting off on an all-inclusive five-star holiday to the sun in
2016!

By 1845 Cook was
diversifying, with railway excursions to Liverpool from Leicester, Nottingham
and Derby.

A decade later and he was
leading overseas trips for the first time. Two groups travelled from Harwich to
Paris via Antwerp, Brussels, Cologne, Heidelberg and Strasbourg.

More innovation followed
in 1865, with the arrival of the first high street travel agent in Fleet
Street, London.

Over the next 14 years,
Thomas Cook worked in partnership with his son, John Mason Cook, who took over
in 1879 and was himself succeeded by his three sons on his death in 1899. Cook
Snr had passed away in 1892.

The brothers started to
cater for the travelling elite, ­introducing winter sports holidays, tours by
motor car and later by the first commercial aeroplanes.

In 1928 the firm was sold
overseas, but returned to British hands in the mid-1940s and benefited from the
post-war package holiday boom of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Today, now merged with My
Travel Group and the Co-operative Travel Group, Thomas Cook , with a new Sunny
Heart logo, is one of the world’s top leisure travel groups.

It has sales of
£7.8billion and employs 22,000 people in 15 countries.

1 - cost in shillings of
that first teetotal trip on July 5, 1841 (5p in today’s money, but equivalent
to around £4.70).

32 - aircraft in the
Thomas Cook Airlines fleet.

50 – years that Thomas
Cook owns and operates a funicular railway at the top of Mount Vesuvius, near
Naples, Italy.

222 – days on the first
round-the-world tour which started in September, 1872. It was personally
escorted by Cook, covers 29,000 miles and costs around £300 (equivalent to
£30,600 today). The group travel via North America, Japan, China, Singapore,
India, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Italy and France.

22,000 - employees across
the business today, and operates from 15 countries.

1.1 million - muffins from
celebrity chef James Martin are consumed on Thomas Cook Airlines each year.